Are Cowboys Secretly Fond of Each Other? Country, Queerdom, and
Geographic Centers.

For a radical queer male, country music is disputed territory. The assumption among hip critics is that any desire for the sounds is a barely hidden dodge concerning my love for cowboys. However, country music itself is not a guilty pleasure for me, because I grew up on the prairies; it is my heritage, the music of my parents and my grandparents. It has taught me about honour, devotion, god and desire. Moreover, I have learnt about tragedy, surrender, and survival.

The shame that comes from listening to country is it is implicit and sometimes explicit homophobic and hetero-normative frameworks. Its history works in conjunction with those who colonize; even the virtues mentioned have something negative to them. The shame then is one of having to choose a side, making excuses for the patriarchy, and burying all of the difficulties in a flood of cheap nostalgia and fake psycho-geography.

To emerge from that flood, to put the dikes up, is to examine disputed territory. So I want to speak of a history, some personal and some not, of queerness and country music. The songs that can be about sex between men, the drag queens dressed as Reba and Dolly, the violence that occurs with distressing regularity, the seismic interruptions when cowboys love each other, what the fag rumors about Kenny Chesney mean, masturbating to CMT as subversive practice and how far Toby Keith's libertines antics might go.